JAPAN: A Taiwanese China Airlines plane has been forced to make an emergency landing at an airport in Japan after running low on fuel, airport officials say. 

The jet was on its way from Taipei to Nagoya when its pilots requested a landing at Kansai, in western Japan. 
 
There were no reports of injuries to passengers or crew. 
 
The incident comes two days after a China Airlines plane exploded in a fireball shortly after landing on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa. 
 
The plane, which had taken off from Taipei with more than 160 people on board, was forced to circle the airport in Chubu. A spokesman for China Airlines said the main reason the plane had to make an unscheduled stop at Kansai airport was that it had been told that the runway at Nagoya had been closed after a bird became stuck in the engine of another jet.
 
He said the plane waited until the pilots were told that the runway was open and then continued on to Nagoya. 

Earlier reports said the plane had been forced to land because it had run out of fuel. 
 
In Monday’s incident at Naha airport all 165 people on board survived, with some escaping just seconds before the plane exploded. 
 
Aviation officials from the US and Taiwan have been examining the wreckage for clues as to why the plane burst into flames, and are reported to be focusing on the possibility of a fuel leak from one of the engines.-
AFT

ASIA: Dengue fever is raging across Southeast Asia, prompting the World Health Organization to warn that the region could face the worst outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus in nearly a decade.

The disease, sometimes called the “bone breaker” illness because of the excruciating joint pain it causes, has flared across the region from ultramodern Singapore to poor Vietnam. There are four different types of dengue, and none have a cure or vaccine.

Cambodia is currently one of the most worrisome spots, where the disease has attacked about 25,000 people and killed nearly 300 children under age 15 so far this year. That’s about three times more than the number of cases for all of 2005, according to WHO.

Sick children have overwhelmed ill-equipped hospitals there, forcing babies burning up with fever to wait for beds outside with IV drips attached to their arms.

The last major outbreak to hit Southeast Asia was in 1998, when about 350,000 cases were reported region wide, including nearly 1,500 deaths. Indonesia and Thailand were not included in that tally.

John Ehrenberg, WHO’s regional adviser on vector borne diseases, said it could potentially reach that level again this year.

“It looks like it might be a bad year,” he said. “I think we’re in the building-up stage, but it could very well peak by August or September.”

Malaysia has seen a 50 percent jump in cases this year over the same period in 2006, with more than 1,000 patients admitted every week for the past month and 56 deaths recorded through June, according to Health Ministry figures.

In Indonesia, more than 100,000 infections have been reported this year, including 1,100 deaths. That compares to 114,000 cases and the same number of fatalities for all of 2006, said Nyoman Kandun, a senior Health Ministry official who predicted the number will hit 200,000 by year’s end.

More than a dozen children infected with dengue filled beds in Jakarta’s Tarakan Hospital. Some had IV drips in their hands while others had tubes coming from their noses.

Muhammad Wildan, 5, was hospitalized last week and remained in critical condition due to internal bleeding. Doctors said he’s lucky his family did not wait any longer to bring him in.

“It did not come to us that it was dengue,” said Padmi Sari, the boy’s grandmother. “We thought it was just a common fever.”

Singapore, known for its spotless streets and cutting-edge health facilities, has also not escaped dengue this year. The government has reported nearly 5,000 cases and at least three deaths. Early rains also caused a surge in cases in Thailand with more than 20,000 cases reported through June, including 17 deaths, officials said.

In Vietnam, which also typically logs a high number of annual cases, health officials have seen a 40 percent increase over last year reporting more than 33,000 infections this year and 32 deaths.

In addition to joint pain, rashes, nausea, severe headaches and high fever that typically accompany the disease, patients stricken with a more serious form, called dengue hemorrhagic fever, can experience internal bleeding, liver enlargement and circulatory shut down.

“You don’t want to have people staying at home and starting to bleed,” Ehrenberg said. “By the time they go to the hospital they’re in shock and they will die.”

The disease is not nearly as lethal as malaria, which kills more than 1 million people annually. But WHO estimates dengue infects up to 50 million people every year worldwide, mostly in Asia and Latin America. About a half million of those cases are severe, and some 19,000 deaths were recorded in 2002.

“We always think next year it will get better, but we always find next year it gets worse,” said Kroeger Axel, a dengue research coordinator at the WHO in Geneva. “There’s a very clear upward trend.”

He said outbreaks run in cycles, occurring roughly every four years. Mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools of water ranging from flower pots to old tires, and residents across the region are urged to avoid letting water collect near houses.

CEBU CITY: A tourism industry executive said the Philippines could become the top tropical destination in Asia by marketing the country through Cebu, which has a flourishing tourism industry.

“It’s easier to market the Philippines through Cebu,” said Angel Ramos Bognot, president of the National Association of Independent Travel Agencies Philippines.

Bognot said Cebu is the “vortex” of Philippine tourism and luring more foreign tourists through the province will not be difficult given its positive reputation in the international market.

“It’s like selling infant’s milk formula. You only tell them one thing good about the product like it boosts brain development and it sells,” Bognot said.

“Cebu is indeed a world class destination. It’s a tourism magnet,” she added.

She said growth in tourism-related developments—such as the entry of international hotel operators, increase in the volume of foreign visitors and additional flights to and from Cebu—only proves interest among travelers and businessmen in Cebu is growing.

She said it would be easier for tour operators to create inter­island linkages and tourism packages because of Cebu’s strategic location to the rest of the country.

Neighboring provinces like Bohol, Negros Oriental, Pala­wan, Samar and Leyte are already benefiting from the spill over of tourists from Cebu.

“If Manila is for business, Cebu is for leisure,” Bognot said.

Travelocity was fined nearly $183,000 for booking roughly 1,400 Cuba trips between 1998 and 2004, apparently the first time Washington has cracked down on a major online travel provider for violating the 1963 embargo on the communist nation.

Travelocity blamed the 1,458 violations on technical issues that were corrected years ago. ”In no way did the company intend to sell trips to Cuba,” the spokeswoman, Ashley Johnson, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. “The trips to Cuba . . . were unintentionally booked online because of a technical issue several years ago and it’s just now being settled.”

Johnson said the trips were booked in the United States. But Travelocity’s penalty comes amid conflicts over foreign arms of U.S. firms selling trips into the popular Caribbean vacation spot. And it touches on the complications of isolating a country commercially amid an increasingly global and digital economy.

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also fined American Express Travel for allowing its Mexican subsidiary to book two groups on Cuba trips in December 2002 and October 2003. But while American Express paid $16,625 for its two incidents, Travelocity was fined $182,750 for 1,458 violations, OFAC disclosed Saturday.

The Travelocity fine is the second-highest imposed by the OFAC during this fiscal year, ending Sept. 30. The highest fine — $220,000 — was levied on LogicaCMG of Lexington, Mass. Its predecessor, CMG Telecommunications, exported computers, electronic components and technical support knowing the goods were destined for Cuba in 2001.

The penalties do not seem to open up a new front in the Bush administration’s energetic enforcement of laws designed to hurt Cuba’s economy. Experts on the embargo said federal law is fairly clear that foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms can’t do business in Cuba, and that OFAC clarified the matter with travel companies five years ago.

At the time, an unknown Internet travel company had requested permission for its foreign website to book Cuba trips for people not subject to U.S. jurisdiction — namely the 2 million people who vacation in Cuba each year.

The company, whose name OFAC did not disclose, noted travel providers had always been free to include information on Cuba flights, hotel rates and air fares on digital booking systems used by travel agents. Why should the online version be any different?

But in a 2002 letter, OFAC’s director at the time, Richard Newcomb, said the Internet had transformed those booking systems into commercial ventures where financial transactions take place. As a result, the subsidiary was banned from selling Cuba trips. Clif Burns, an export lawyer specializing in Cuba, said the matter seemed settled with the letter. An OFAC official who did not want to be identified said Travelocity was the first large online travel provider to face an OFAC fine.